Boys who remember fathers and older brothers who never came home, who see only their own pain, and ignore the pain of others. Vets who remember Matt’s Vietnam all too well, the mother and little brother Matt can’t forget. Sometimes we hang onto the past so hard that we can’t see how to move ahead into the future. A rice paddy with a rat drawn on it, and underneath “Matt-the-Rat.” Coach is angry, but nothing changes. The next day, Matt makes the team, and there’s a picture taped to his locker. But when he does, Matt can hear the whispers from the other players. Matt and his now dad play catch, and his dad tells Matt he should try out for the team. In the middle of the night, when he’s jolted awake by his dreams of screams and flashes, his now mother sits on his bed and sings to him, as he thinks, Ten years later, Matt’s mother pushed him into a swarm of children around the American helicopters, telling him he had to leave her and his little brother to go to America, where he’d be safe, even if he was alone. In Vietnam, before he was born, his blue-eyed father hugged the woman who called him husband, stroked her pregnant stomach, and told her, “I’ll be back.” But he never returned.

You can only turn around and summon the courage to face it. You can’t escape your past, it always follows you. Two years after being airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975, Matt Pin is haunted by the terrible secret he left behind and, now, in a loving adoptive home in the United States, a series of profound events forces him to confront his past. Publishing Information : Scholastic Press: New York, 2009

Dove Song by Kristine L. Franklin